Something bulges under his jacket. Is it a gun tucked into the back of his waistband? That must have been what set off the metal detector. His grip on my arm is so tight, I’m losing feeling in my fingers.
“You can let go now,” I say. “I’m coming.”
He flings my arm at me. I rub the red skin where he gripped me and switch tactics again. “Vinny, look. I know you’re loyal to John. But Summer’s a liability. He should cut his losses and get rid of her. He’s still clean. He wasn’t there. He’s only reported what Summer told—”
“Stop talking!” he snarls. “You don’t understand.”
This is good. At least he’s communicating with me. “What don’t I understand?”
He leans in close, his breath sour. I force myself not to back away as a drop of sweat runs down his brow and splashes onto my shoulder. “This is nothing, a blip on his radar. He will not change his plans for this. Maybe he gets rid of Summer, maybe not. But on his time. It’s not your fight. Stay out of it.”
His sweat trickles down my arm. “You know he was sleeping with Amythest,” I say.
“So?” He throws his arm wide at the town. “He takes what he wants. This town, he owns it. It will be destroyed next month. And he will build a resort, a port—billions of dollars. That is what this trip is about. Not this…girl drama.”
“It’s not drama,” I say. “It’s murder.” I don’t know why I’m trying, since he’s clearly never going to see it my way. We’re operating from two completely different rule books, and his trumps mine.
“Accusations can go both ways,” he warns.
He wheels around and marches down the wide stone steps. The glare of the sun on the white stone is so bright, I can hardly look at the ground in front of me as I hurry after him. “Are you threatening me?”
“Your sister’s on her way to your grandmother’s,” he growls.
What? How does he know that? “Please leave Lauren out of this,” I beg, remembering all the emails.
“Don’t be stupid.” He turns to face me. “Remember why you’re here.”
I’m trying to figure out what he means when I notice the gun in his hand, glinting in the sunlight, and my mind blanks. The breath goes out of me. Instinctively, I raise my hands. “Vinny, please.”
He comes around behind me and buries the barrel of the gun just above my tailbone. Suddenly the heat of the day is gone. I’m cold with terror, every nerve in my body focused on the hard point of metal thrust into my back. “Walk,” he orders.
I put one foot in front of the other, my mind speeding. I think of Lauren, my parents, Grannie, Eric. I have to get away. It can’t end here. “Please don’t kill me,” I plead. “I’ll keep my mouth shut. I swear.”
“I’m not gonna kill you,” he hisses into my hair. “I’m helping you.”
Wait, what?
I twist around to see if he’s fucking with me, and he prods me with the gun. “Keep walking.”
He pushes me up a deserted street that doesn’t look familiar. The cobblestones are uneven, all the shops shuttered. Is he just pretending he’s helping me so I’ll comply while he walks me to my death?
Apprehension thrums under my skin. “Helping me do what?”
“Get the fuck out of here. Against my orders.”
“Why?”
“I’ve done terrible things for him,” he confesses grimly. “But I don’t believe in hurting women and children.”
My mind spins. Could he actually be trying to help me? “How do I know I can trust you?”
“You don’t.” He prods me forward. “There’s a string of towns just over the hill up there.” He points ahead of us. “Find the train. Come to 12 Chemin de la Pommière in La Quessine at nine tonight. I’ll get you out.”
“But how? I have no money, no passport.…”
He reaches in his pocket and hands me a few folded bills. “Twelve Chemin de la Pommière, in La Quessine. At nine.”
I wrench around to see his face. “Where is that?”
His brow is furrowed, his eyes dark. “Near Saint-Tropez.”
“But—”
“Now go,” he barks. “I’ll tell them you got away.”
Gripping the cash in my sweaty palm, I take off up the hill, fear propelling me forward at a speed I have not run since high school track. As I reach the first intersecting street, I glance over my shoulder to see Vinny standing silhouetted by the sun where I left him, the gun dangling from his hand. I break around the corner and sprint into the shade created by the height of the buildings, pushing myself harder, faster up the desolate road, turning again at the next fork to continue up the hill.
Twelve Chemin de la Pommière in La Quessine.
I catapult over an orange construction barrier and leap over an open trench, my sandal folding as I land, sending me to all fours on the uneven pavement. The cash scatters onto the street and I scramble to scoop it up before it blows away, stuffing it into my purse in a clump. One of my knees is bloodied and pain shoots through my ankle, but I brush myself off and push on.
The road narrows as it climbs up the mountain toward the edge of town. My breath ragged, I hurtle up the incline, right and left and right until a sharp twinge in my side doubles me over in the boarded doorway of an abandoned home.
My breath comes hot and fast. I watch a sticky line of blood cut through the dust on my leg. Is that a siren in the distance? I have to keep going. My tongue feels like cotton, but all I can do is continue up the hill.
Twelve Chemin de la Pommière in La Quessine.
Right, left, up a set of stairs, right again, tripping up the bumpy road. I wipe the sweat from my brow, panting, and slow just enough to maintain my pace.
As I climb higher, I feel the beginnings of a slight breeze. I’m relieved I must be reaching a break in the maze. I need to find a lookout site to reorient myself and determine whether I’m still headed in the direction Vinny indicated.
Jesus. Vinny. Who would have thought…? But I can’t wrap my head around any of that right now. I spot a narrow stairwell leading up to a terrace and take the terra-cotta steps two at a time, my legs wobbly from overexertion.
A rush of fresh air hits me as I ascend the last steps to find myself standing in the full glare of the sun, high above the town. Uneven rooftops tumble down the colorful crescent slope to the sea, where the Lion’s Den bobs alone in the cove. I instinctively flatten my back against the wall, but I’m likely too far away to be seen.
I take Amythest’s phone from my purse and key in the address before I forget it, then count the wad of cash Vinny gave me, my hands trembling. It’s eighty euros. Not a lot, but better than the less than forty I have left. The phone still has no signal, so I carefully lean out over the railing to orient myself. I’m a good way toward the east side of the crescent, near where the town fades into the terrain. I can’t see the cliffs from this vantage point, but I can tell that I’m close.
I clamber back down the stairs and continue up the street until it dead-ends into a stone retaining wall with a blur of green above it. It’s about seven feet to the top, too high for me to pull myself up unassisted, but the rocks are big enough that I should be able to get a pretty good grip with bare feet.
I unstrap my sandals and stuff them halfway in my bag, then place my less-injured foot on a big stone about two feet off the ground and push off, simultaneously reaching up with my opposite hand to grab the upper lip of the wall. With my fingers firmly grasping the grooves of the rocks on top, it’s easy enough to scale the rest of the wall. I scramble to standing.
The slope of the hill beyond is steep, but not insurmountable, and it appears to level out about a hundred or so yards up. The terrain is not unlike California: rocky and blanketed in a fine dry dust, scattered with shrublike bushes and wildflowers that should camouflage me as I climb.
I wish I had hiking shoes, but my flimsy sandals will have to do. I slip them back on and grab the stem of a scrawny tree to hoist myself up. Branch by branch, rock by
rock, I slowly but surely ascend, ignoring my unbearable thirst. Somewhere near the top, I stumble upon a hiking trail and have to stifle a shriek of glee at my good fortune. I follow the path to the crest of the bluff, where I can see Terralione arranged around the little port way down below.
The Lion’s Den is gone.
I scan the blue sea for that one particular white dot and spot her sailing west toward France. She cuts through the water easily, a vision of grace and style. Anyone watching her sleek shape pass would aspire to view the shore from her wide deck, to be rocked gently to sleep in her cool embrace.
The yacht’s departure is cold comfort at this point. But as she slips away, one of the tightly strung threads inside me loosens ever so slightly. Vinny kept his word.
(twenty days ago)
Los Angeles
The Prius twitched through traffic beneath a procession of swaying palm trees arched toward the sun. I shouldn’t have been driving—I hadn’t slept. I was too wound up, too distracted. My hands were clammy, even with the AC blasting. But we were on our way downtown to meet Eric’s art dealer, George, who’d arranged a passport and a place for him to stay in Mexico.
“So, your father—John—” A small shake of my head. I still couldn’t quite get used to this. “Why are you afraid of him? Is it because of Summer?”
“God, no.” He laughed. “Summer’s just a fly…a diversion. The irony that after everything, she’d be the one to nearly succeed in killing me…” He laughed in disbelief.
Irritation prickled my spine. He was asking a lot of me and had given me almost nothing, promising to tell me everything once we were on the road. I yanked the wheel and gassed it into a faster-moving lane. “So, what then?”
“Do you remember last year, a shopping center in Colombia collapsed while it was being built, killing four people and injuring dozens?”
I accelerated through a yellow light. “No.”
“It was pretty big news, but it wasn’t in the States, so it didn’t stay in the cycle for long. Anyway, it was my dad’s company that was building the mall. There were a million corners he cut that resulted in the collapse—the concrete they were using was substandard and not suited to hold that amount of weight; there weren’t enough steel-reinforcement bars; the plans were changed once the permits had been obtained—common practices for him. He, of course, denied any wrongdoing. There was an investigation afterward, but he managed to bribe his way out of it, and eventually the blame was placed on the contractor.”
“Jesus, that’s…beyond horrifying.” I stole a glance at him just as the car in front of me suddenly stopped. I jammed on the brakes, coming to rest inches from its bumper. I took a deep breath and looked over at Eric, who was wincing in pain from the seat belt. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He took a deep breath. “I learned the truth only because the families of the men who died wanted some kind of reparation and had hired lawyers who were working their way through the different names and companies associated with Lionshare, which is how they found their way to me. They showed me the amount of evidence they had amassed—it was staggering. I went to my father and asked him to make it right with them, but he refused. He said that admitting any involvement in the collapse would be catastrophic for Lionshare and tried to convince me of how much I had to lose if the company went under. When he saw that line of reasoning wasn’t going to work with me, he warned me to let it go—for their sake and for my own.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t let it go. I went to Dylan to try to get him to help me investigate—he used to be a journalist, and he had access to records because of his position at Lionshare—but he stonewalled me. He thought I was out of my mind for risking my life for these people I’d never met, when there was no way I was going to win.”
“So that’s why you guys had been fighting.”
“The latest reason anyway—and the worst. But I didn’t give up. I found a guy with a conscience who worked for the committee tasked with investigating the collapse. He felt so guilty about the whole thing that, against his better judgment, he was willing to go on record and provide proof of the crimes and bribes my father and his men had ordered.” He pointed. “Turn here.”
I made a right onto a one-way street that stretched past city hall into the heart of downtown.
“I flew down there two weeks ago to collect the evidence and interview the guy myself before finding a journalist to write the story; then I stored everything in my place here and went to my show in San Francisco. When I got home, my loft had been ransacked, and all my evidence and the interview tapes were gone.” He pointed at an alley up ahead. “Left there.”
He took the jeans he’d been wearing last night out of the backpack I’d loaned him and rifled through the pockets as I gunned it through a break in the traffic across three lanes, into the neatly swept alley. Tall buildings towered above us, casting deep shadows that kept the narrow passage cool. “Stop here,” Eric indicated.
I brought the Prius to a halt in front of an unmarked steel door, and he handed me a folded picture. “They left this.”
I unfolded it and gasped. It was a photo of a dead man, his white button-down stained red by the blood from bullet holes in his chest. “Oh my God,” I said. “Who is this?”
“My informant.”
“Jesus,” I breathed. So this was the trouble Eric had gotten himself caught up in, and it was far worse than anything I could have imagined. I returned the photo to him, and he carefully placed it in the pocket of his jeans. “This was John’s doing?”
“Has to be. But I’m not letting it go. It’s only a matter of time before something like that collapse happens again. Summer actually did me a favor pushing me off that cliff. She gave me a chance to disappear until I can figure out a better plan to bring him down.”
“But how did he know you were talking to this informant?”
“I don’t know. Initially I assumed Dylan had told him of my intention, but he didn’t know the specifics. John could have been in my email or tapped my phone—he has the capability I’m sure—though I was careful. Or it could be as simple as someone on my informant’s end who learned he was working with me and ratted him out.”
I tried to recall whether Eric and I had ever emailed or talked on the phone—I didn’t think we had. We’d used apps mostly, which even with my limited knowledge of such things I knew were harder to hack than email. Not, I reminded myself, that anyone besides Summer had reason to be suspicious of our interaction. “Does Summer have your phone?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Which means if anyone becomes suspicious there was foul play involved in your disappearance, she’ll find a way to turn it in, implicating me.” The realization hit me like a bus. “Fuck. You’re gonna have to figure this shit out before I get thrown in jail for your murder.”
“I’m not gonna let that happen.” He grabbed my hand, forcing me to meet his eye. “I promise.”
The steel door in the wall opened and a striking Latina in a black tunic dress emerged, a messenger bag slung across her shoulder. Her long dark hair was swept up in a messy bun, her lips stained red. She smiled and waved.
“That’s George?” I asked, surprised.
“The one and only,” he confirmed.
She peered into the car, her eyes going wide behind her black-framed glasses as she saw Eric.
“Dios mío,” she said, getting into the backseat. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you,” he said dryly. “You sure you weren’t followed?”
“Yes. I did just what you said. What happened to you?”
“Summer pushed me off a cliff.”
Her jaw dropped.
“My sentiments exactly,” he said. “But that’s the least of my problems. My father wants me dead, too.”
“Welcome to the club. My father ever escapes from prison, I am—” She drew a finger across her throat.
It was disconcerting yet grimly charming, how lightl
y she alluded to her own demise. I extended my hand through the center divide. “I’m Belle.”
She flashed a somber smile. “Thank you for taking care of my friend. I’m sorry I can’t go with you. Mexico is still too dangerous for me, even with my new name.”
“George isn’t your real name?” I asked.
She laughed. “I was Maria in a past life.”
“George and I met here,” Eric explained. “But later figured out our illustrious fathers had collaborated on a development in Mexico many years ago—”
“That drained a marshland and displaced an entire village,” she elaborated.
“Small world,” I commented.
“Yes,” she agreed. “At the top, all the most powerful men are in each other’s pockets, though they are always claiming otherwise.”
“And now she somehow miraculously convinces suckers to pay far more for my art than it’s worth,” he finished.
She passed him the messenger bag. “One hundred thousand. You have a couple of pieces pending, so there should be more soon. The passport and the key to my friend’s place in Rosarito are in the front pocket. He understands the need for confidentiality.”
“I can’t thank you enough,” Eric said.
“You’ve done more for me.” She waved his gratitude away. “I had a weird message from your brother yesterday. I haven’t called him back.”
“Did you save it?” Eric asked.
She brought up Dylan’s voice mail on her phone and hit play. Dylan’s voice was tinny over the speakerphone. “Hi, George. It’s Dylan. Please call me back as soon as possible. It’s important.”
“Can you call him now?” Eric asked. “I want to hear what he has to say.”
She hit call back. As the other end rang, Eric mouthed, You haven’t seen me. You know nothing.
“Dylan, it’s George Ramirez, returning,” George said into the phone.
“Right.” Dylan cleared his throat. “Hi, George. Thanks for calling me back. I’m sorry to—”
“What’s going on?” George asked, feigning concern.
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